CDF

Educational/Research Facilities and Classroom

Concurrent Design Facility (CDF) (at the 3rd floor of the Collaboration Complex)

Cutting-edge Concurrent Design Facility

The SDM installed the Concurrent Design Facility (CDF) as one of its core research and educational facilities. The state-of-the-art display equipment is built around 4K three-dimensional imaging and lends itself to a wide range of uses. It is both a display for ordinary classroom presentations, distance learning and teleconferencing, and also an experimental device suitable to group work in systems design, simulation and visualization.

A multi-display environment with up to 6 screens

4K screen and 108 inch
full high vision LCD monitors

Immersive presentation is one of the most promising new trends in video display. Built on virtual reality technology, these systems are moving into commercialization, and as they do, they are required to have ever higher resolutions. "4K" refers to a resolution of 4,096 (horizontal) x 2,160 (vertical) pixels, which is approximately quadruple the resolution of conventional full high vision. The CDF is notable for its two stacked 4K projectors (SONY, SRX-S110), and it uses polarization techniques to achieve three-dimensional projection with both high-resolution and a high degree of immersion. The projector has a luminescence of 10,000 ANSI lumens, which is combined with a rear projection hard screen (Nippura, Blue Ocean) to achieve excellent brightness and contrast. In addition to projecting three-dimensional video at 4K resolutions, this display can also be used as a multi-display for 4 screens worth of full high vision images. The facility is designed for flexibility too. On either side of the 4K screen are 108 inch full high vision LCD monitors, giving the CDF a multi-display environment with up to 6 screens available for use.

The system is compatible with a wide range of CG and video imaging

The system is compatible with a wide range of CG and video imaging. Input comes from 7 graphics computers, including 2 for synthesizing 4K three-dimensional video (Dell Precision T7400, 2x Quad Core Xeon 3.2GHz + NVIDIA Quadro Plex 1000 Model IV), a video server, an educational workstation terminal (IBM BladeCenter HC10), or just an ordinary notebook computer brought from home. The graphics computers are dual-boot Linux /Windows systems capable of running most required applications. The input sources and outputs are connected through a matrix switch, and a wireless touch panel allows the operator to switch them freely.

Presentation using a multi-display environment with up to 6 screens

Presentation using
a multi-display environment

Below is a schematic of the CDF in use. There are currently several different software packages that can be used to synthesize 4K three-dimensional video, including the "OpenCABIN" library developed at a consortium in which the Prof. Tetsuro Ogi's laboratory participates, "Fusion VR" developed as part of a joint research project with KGT Inc. and FiatLux Corp., and the commercial visualization tool "AVS." However, all of these require some degree of expertise with CG imaging, and one of the tasks to be tackled in the future is the creation of an environment that can be used by non-specialist operators to quickly and easily achieve high-quality images.